SoCal Stereotypes We Love and Cherish

I applied to the University of California, Irvine, writing program and I was accepted. I went to visit it and I thought it was more than I could handle – in terms of having to get on a six-lane freeway to get a gallon of milk, trying to figure out which one was my building among 16 identical huge high rises in a building complex. I was really frightened of it.

That's a good reason to be afraid of living in Orange County, Francesca Delbanco, but not, strictly speaking, Los Angeles. Eventually Robert Birnbaum gets around to her debut novel, Ask Me Anything--which he liked a bit more than I did, but it's still fairly interesting to see him draw her out on her desire to write about characters "sitting on the fence between two worlds – childhood and extended adolescence and the beginning of wisdom and adulthood."